You cannot be serious…

Right, I’m not keen on Asian food, we both hate hills, we’re both veggies added to which I’m, as many will know quite ‘fussy’ about my food, and I don’t like flying so where are we off to next then? Well that’s a good question and the answer is of course, the rather mountainous Asian country of South Korea, a place not renowned for its vegetarian food. In fact they apparently love fish oil so much that it’s made us worry whether they put it in the coffee too. We may be using Pizza Hut a lot for the next couple of months!

Still, it looks an absolutely stunning country and the cycle infrastructure is one of the best outside Holland, and the Buddhist monks are Veggie so we may have to get religion while we’re there! Though I think the 4am meditation maybe a bit early for us…

We set off on the 31st Augist, cycling up to Norwich from Sudbourne and then flying out at 17:20 the next day. We decided not to cycle up to Norwich on the day we fly for obvious reasons. Would you want to sit next to two lycra clad sweaty MAMALS who badly need a shower for 10 hours? No! And besides you’re not allowed to take weapons on planes and Jon’s feet fall into the chemical weapon category after a long hot cycle!

Our aim is to pack Tilly (the tandem) up at the airport and then hopefully assemble her again at the other end. It’ll be a short cycling holiday if Tilly ends up in lost luggage somewhere! We’ve prebooked and paid for her and agreed dimensions and weight. For all those of you who go on holiday and find 23kg of luggage allowance small, we’ve got 2 months worth of gear including tent, sleeping bags, cooking stuff, waterproofs, spare tyre and tubes etc in our panniers and they weigh in at 36kg in total. Tilly is sports equipment so gets her own allowance at 23kg (which she’s 500 grams under!) and goes in a large carrier bag – very large! Many Bikes are sent in bike boxes but flying from Norwich you can’t use a bike box, so we’ve made ourselves a clear plastic bag out of our ground sheet, held together with ‘fragile’ tape. It’s actually quite tough, the plastics is reinforced and being see through maybe Tilly will be treated carefully rather than thrown around like suitcases.

Its taken us a while to get organised for this trip one of the last was to get Tilly serviced at Jarrolds in Norwich. We went down to collect her and found her rear hub is ‘significantly worn’ so much so that the cassette wobbled quite freely and so it needed replacing.

Naturally this wasn’t straightforward. There seems to have been a run on 26″ Halo Hubs so we’ve had to order a whole new Halo 26″ 48 spoke SAS Wheel. I’m not sure why it’s called SAS either, sounds tough, so hopefully it will be fine, time will tell…